3/04/2009 @ 4:00PM

Diamond In The Rough

Set a few hundred feet from the edge of the Atlantic Ocean on Lumley Beach, Chez Nous is pricey by local standards: $3 for a steak with frites, $1 for a beer. But it’s welcome relief for a weary traveler looking for an excellent French meal in Sierra Leone.

The food is tasty, the views spectacular and, perhaps best of all, there’s a flush toilet should you need it.

Born in Sierra Leone, raised in Lebanon and schooled in France, owner Faysal Debeis fulfilled a lifelong dream by opening Chez Nous in 1995, two years before civil war spilled into Freetown.

As one of the first investors on Lumley Beach, Debeis initially paid just 75,000 Leones ($25) per year to lease the land and now pays $100. In 1997 as the rebels approached Freetown, Debeis fled to the U.S., waiting out the war with relatives in Los Angeles.

In 2002, Debeis returned to Sierra Leone to find Chez Nous in ruins. The windows were smashed, the doors were missing and all of the appliances were gone.

“The place was completely shattered,” he says.

Over the next month, Debeis poured in $15,000–a year’s profits, during good times–to rebuild his restaurant. Soon he was catering to the thousands of international relief workers who flooded the country at the war’s end.

Though traffic was brisk for a few years, things have slowed lately. Down the road, the shell of a new beach-side hotel sits unfinished. Many NGOs have cut back on staff in Sierra Leone, either dispatching them to headline-grabbing conflict zones like Congo and Sudan, or cutting them entirely because of financial troubles.

But once the global downturn is over, Debeis thinks Sierra Leone will finally prosper.